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Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 20.39-40 (2003): 95-109 The Autonomy of Art and the Market
I intend to write a simple expository text, which will gradually reveal its problematic nature. As soon as I wrote that opening sentence, I realized that its elementary syntax suggests a false perspective, caused by the use of 'simple.' This word commonly means "whatever allows easy and quick understanding." Here, however, the sense of the word is distilled from the well-known distinction between diamond and glass structures. The diamond displays such a sophisticated complexity that, when crossed by a beam of light, it causes the diffraction of light, showing its spectrum of colors. On the contrary, the loose constitution of a piece of glass offers no resistance to the light beam, which traverses it easily. So the diamond is simple as a consequence of its well-wrought complexity, which obstructs its physical "easiness." Something similar happens to 'as soon as,' which I used as a "quickening" qualifier to open my second sentence. It is enough to say that in ordinary language it designates something that is understood automatically, without effort: "Just by looking at his face you can quickly tell he's in a bad mood." In the same sense, one talks about the quickness sought by the language of the media. In contrast, here is what a contemporary theorist has to say about the language praised and used by the early German Romantics (Frühromantiker). Taking as examples texts written at the beginning of the 19th century (Friedrich Schlegel, "Über die Unverständlichkeit" ["On incomprehensibleness," 1800], and Heinrich von Kleist, "Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden" ["On the progressive making of thought in speech," 1805-6]), Karl Heinz Bohrer says that in them "an act of knowledge [is taken] as an event, one that all of a sudden [plötzlich] becomes conscious of itself, and cannot be measured by anything previously given" (Bohrer, 1981: 20; my emphasis). And, since he had previously underscored the role of the fragment in this poetics of discovery, Bohrer is compelled to [end page 95] establish a close link between fragment and suddenness: "This fragmentary object [Fragmentarische] is the appearance of the 'sudden' in prose" (ibid.). These explanations are necessary to give us a certain measure of security before we can return to the opening sentence. If this precaution has been taken, I can now add that my goal is to present a simple exposition that, though not long, attempts to be so well-wrought as to achieve the suddenness of understanding. For this reason, I will rely on moves as slow as those made by a chess player. In this way I will attempt to put in practice a certain tactic: to effect a metamorphosis from the easy to the simple, — i.e., from potentially redundant information to the complexity that allows the diffraction of knowledge. The first step will be to consult a good encyclopedia. Say, the entry "autonomy" in a recent edition of the Ästhetische Grundbegriffe: "From an artistic-poetic [poetologisch] perspective, autonomy immediately concerns the growing autonomization of art in relation to poetic models [poetologischen Vorgaben], and hence the progressive emancipation from its original imitative function.… The split since Cubism between mimesis and the independent verbal and pictorial object points to a radical autonomy in relation to both reality and the artist or writer him- or herself" (Einfat, 2000: 1.435). The passage is so clear that no further comment is necessary. In order to turn description into problematics, all that needs to be done is to emphasize the following basic points: 1. The question of the autonomy of art, theoretically grounded in Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790), from a socio-historical point of view meant that the artistic object was independent of any institution. When the institution had a religious character, art was part of divine service; if it was a political one, art ultimately had to glorify the prince. This process, beginning in the Italian Renaissance, would not have been possible without the previous existence of a clientele that had progressively replaced commissions from wealthy patrons. So, the autonomy of art implies its gradual separation from the aristocracy, the rise of a rich bourgeoisie and the development of the market. 2. This social change is accompanied by the abandonment of previously established and legitimated patterns of making art, i.e., the model of imitatio. 3. The autonomous artist no longer needs a guild, whose function during the Middle Ages was to protect its members from the depreciation of their products; he does not have to work for a specific patron; and, as to composition, he is under no obligation to follow the recognized topoi. 4. He may now fuse his own personal traits with the representation of the major figure in the Christian universe, the figure of Christ, as Dürer does in his 1498 and 1500 self-portraits. (It is interesting to point out that this [end page 96] precedes by a few good decades Montaigne's introduction of himself in the situations described in his Essais [1580].) 5. Because art no longer has an institutionalized function, its expressive universe is enormously expanded. From now on, the world is not restricted to a sacred outlook; portraits need not glorify their subjects, and are free to depict domestic and lowly situations, as often occurs in Flemish painting. 6. The widening of the scope of art eventually oversteps the boundaries of the world of things and the artist's self-expression. The abandonment of the model of imitation allowed the possibility of a non-representative, non-referential art. So, although the expansion of abstract art took place only in the 20th century, it had already been foretold in eighteenth-century Germany. For instance, in Ludwig Tieck's novel Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen (1798), whose protagonist is a painter, there are passages in which the praise of the autonomous subject is associated with the autonomy of painting. The idea of autonomous painting implies the possibility of a work that would represent nothing but itself[1]: "The highest art can explain only itself; it is a song [Gesang] whose content lies only in itself" (Tieck, 1798, Part II, Book I, ch. 5: 250). At about the same time, probably in 1800, Schlegel wrote two fragments, the combination of which should be explored; the arabesque, being non-representative, is seen as a way for art to free itself of the idolatry of the world and the self: "The portrait is just as idolatrous in relation to human individuality as the landscape is in relation to nature" (Fr. Schlegel, 1800: frag. 27, 257); "Pure painting only as arabesque. One should be able to paint hieroglyphically, without mythology. A philosophical painting" (ibid., fragm. 860, 326). The above list can be synthesized in a number of fundamental questions: (a) The disappearance of dependent art would not have endured up to the present were it not for the parallel expansion of the business market. Hence, if it is undeniable that the market favored the autonomy of art, what could be said about the relationship between market and art today? (b) The abandonment of the principle of imitatio, literally stated in Kant's third Critique, corresponds to the implicit questioning of referentiality. Both favored the legitimating of the psychologically-oriented subject, i.e., the self seen as worthy to appear in, or to be the primary source of the work of art. Incidentally, I take exception to the current view that the further disqualification of the power of the self — a recurrent theme since Schopenhauer and Nietzsche — has been of capital importance to the break with reference in art. If my view is right, instead of taking abstract art as one in which the subject disappears, one should think of it instead as the last conspicuous manifestation of the self's directing power — the self shows itself not in the text but in the way that the work, precisely because it has no reference, imposes the interference of another self, the interpreter. [end page 97] What we have called the two basic points will be discussed in such a way that, as we analyze the first, we will eventually arrive at the second. Except for some zealous marchand de tableaux, I don't believe anyone would seriously assert that the presence of the market favors the effective circulation of art. However, in order to define 'effective circulation of art' we must leave for good the field of common information. In other words, we can no longer work with current knowledge. 'Effective circulation of art' implies that the receiver gets in touch with the symbolic character of the work of art. Now, in terms of the rules that the market must follow, the products displayed in it are seen as goods or commodities, i.e., as concrete or virtual objects whose "exchange value" the market is supposed to establish. Since this value is exclusively determined by economic criteria, the market as such is not interested in the symbolic condensation contained in a work of art, and has no resources that would allow it to be taken into account. So the immediate question is what is meant by 'symbolic condensation.' The phrase 'symbolic condensation' is an attempt to explain the symbolic character of art, about which the mechanisms of the market have nothing to say. To avoid an excessively speculative track, I will resort to Simmel's essay on. Here Simmel compares artistic creation to a "psychical germ" [ein seelischer Keim]: "All extensive configuration of any work of art stems from a psychical germ, which, if only the property of extension allowed configuration [Gestaltung], would be formless [gestaltlos] (Simmel, 1916: 34). In other words: every work of art combines extension with configuration [Gestaltung]. But if a work of art could be materialized only by the extension it occupies, it could not be differentiated from any other object, since by itself extension is not enough to accomplish what we call form. Simmel's hypothesis finds the metaphoric sparkle that grounds it in the following passage: "as I suppose, the work of art stems from a psychical germ, which does not at all contain its extensivity, ultimately intuitive, but rather displays a sequence of fully allotropic developments…" (Simmel, op. cit., 37). To say that the work of art stems from a psychical germ means that art depends on the "contaminations" of accidents of life in the artist's mind. Such accidents, however, are not enough for a certain configuration to be accomplished. For the psychical germ is only a point of departure, with no internal affinity for the constitution of the form — which would not be true if the work of art were immediately adaptable to a catharsis of the pain that tortures one's soul, i.e., to confession. Art's anti-confessional character is made evident by the second statement: if the psychical germ is not directly transposed into the poem or canvas, this is so because the work of art "presents a sequence of fully allotropic developments [eine volle alotrope Entwicklungsfolge]. 'Allotropy' refers, in chemistry, to "a property of certain [end page 98] elements, such as carbon, sulfur, or phosphorus, of existing in two or more distinct forms" (Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary). Simmel's use of the term maintains that between the germ and its result there is no linear, deterministic process, so that the work of art cannot be explained analogously to the germination of a seed. Kant's genius is again confirmed by the relation of proximity and profound difference he establishes in the third Critique between the biological telos and "the finality without an end" (Zweckmässikgeit ohne Zweck) of the aesthetic experience. Simmel's analogical explanation grounds Celan's famous dictum: "Art creates the distance-of-the-self" (Celan, 1960: 49). What could this distance-of-the-self (Ich-Ferne) be if not the primordial effect of the allotropic development that is the work of art itself? So I assume that, with the help of Simmel and Celan, I have been able to present a judicious picture of the symbolic character and value of the work of art. I take the phrase to mean that between the work's point of departure and its textual result condensations are introduced, consciously and unconsciously — the overlapping of lived or imagined experiences, masks, disguises, witticisms, conundrums — phenomena that are less important to a psychological explanation of the artist than as devices motivated by the very construction of the work. Aided by such devices, allotropy, occurring between the "psychical germ" and the final presentation, is actualized, and its product becomes, according to the sense of symbolum in classical Latin, "a piece justifying an identity." If I am right in thinking that the above demonstration is valid, I may now turn to the second basic statement: the reason for the mismatch between art and the market. Art and the market, we have said, are based on totally different values. How could the establishment of commercial value properly consider the symbolic condensation of art? So much the worse for art, a realist would say. But what about Marx's analysis of the "fetishism of commodities," which lends them a "mysterious character," so that a commodity turns into "a thing… abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties" (Marx, 1867: Book I, ch. 1, #4, 85)? The obvious consequence is that the market transforms the symbolic condensation of art into a fetish. It is equally obvious that this transformation complicates the problem of art. The concrete situation can be described as follows: art cannot dispense with the market, except in those cases in which the artist is directly commissioned by a private or public institution. (Within capitalist relations, however, patronage can only be a hit-or-miss solution). If the market is not dispensed with, the fetishism of art is a function of factors that have nothing to do with art itself — who commissioned this particular work, the artist's fame, his popularization thanks to his idiosyncrasies, the fact that he is mad, dead or in jail, etc. [end page 99] Therefore, although lending the passage a certain slant, we might quote: "Like the public realm [Öffentlichkeit], the autonomy of art is a category of bourgeois society that both reveals and obscures an actual historical development. All discussions of this category must be judged by… the contradictoriness inherent in the thing itself" (Bürger, 1980: 36). The historical development of autonomy is well-known and needs no further emphasis. The inevitable gap between art and a society governed by market rules is caused, on one hand, by the overlap between "exchange value" and the fetishism of commodities, and, on the other hand, by the symbolic condensation of the work of art. Because autonomous art depends on something that cannot "understand" it, its meaning must be set aside. That is why fully autonomous art, i.e., modern art, is described by negative traits, culminating in a coolly desperate philosophy of art. Adorno's Ästhetische Theorie represents the climax of this position: "The asocial in art is the determined denial of a given society.… Only by its force of social resistance does art maintain itself in life; if it does not reify itself [verdinglicht sich], it becomes a commodity.… What is social in art is its immanent movement against the social, not its explicit stand-taking.… As far as one can foretell a social function of a work of art, this function is its loss of function" (Adorno, 1970: 335-7). The passage takes for granted the situation of art in industrial society. Within its historical frame, the quotation is impressive for a paradoxical property: its despair and its will to resist. In the postwar years, it stated the already quite visible results of the process of autonomy of art. If autonomy had released the artist as a person, it had done so in order to enslave him or her in the most insidious way. That is the reason why Adorno says that the social function of art is to lose its function: the way to serve society is to refuse to serve it. And in order to remain linked to life, art must literally become a thing, to reify itself (sich verdlinglichen). Reification, as I take the concept here, introduces a positive variant into the Marxist concept, since it means to divest itself of everything that might seduce the public: harmony of tones, fluency of language, a lyrical atmosphere — in short, all that encourages an appeasing aesthetic response. Instead, the rough, the dry (Kafka), the grotesque, the pathetic and the comic progress of dramatic situations (Beckett) come to the fore. Such options, however, whose purpose is to refuse to contribute to the seduction of the market, sooner or later turn out to be inoperative or suicidal solutions. Adorno's power of resistance, then, would not be enough to preserve art. On the contrary, his Ästhetische Theorie creates a spiraling abyss, nurtured by increasing paradoxes and oxymora. Thirty years after the publication of Adorno's work, there does not seem to be any light at the end of the tunnel; indeed, if anything, the [end page 100] darkness is deepening. This state of affairs must be due to the gigantic increase of the technical resources at the disposal of the market. Their power does not affect art only. One might even see everyday life as a sort of constant nightmare, from which if anyone at all is saved it is only the mad, top executives, a few pop stars and rentiers. In any case, in order to keep a lucid mind, rather than step into the deepening abyss, it seems better to take into account the historical context of Ästhetische Theorie. To do this, I will contrast the tenor of Adorno's reflections with the immediately preceding and the immediately following contexts. A few decades before Ästhetische Theorie, when the avant-garde was in the making or being disseminated, Clive Bell published his reflections. In the first chapter of the first part of his short essay Art (1914), Bell presents autonomy as liberation: it released art from the duty to represent. "If a representative form has value, it is as form, not as representation. The representative element in a work of art may or may not be harmful; always it is irrelevant.… To appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing but a sense of form and colour and a knowledge of three-dimensional space" (Bell, 1914: 25, 27). By 'representationuote Bell means the conformity of the work of art to the way things are given by perception. Thus, autonomous art is a good thing to the extent that it is art freed from patterns imposed by institutions or patrons. At the time Bell was writing his essay, what is known today as the classic avant-garde was developing. From a purely anarchical start, Dadaism came into full flower with Surrealism, whose first manifesto was published in 1924. To put it somewhat crudely, "the avant-gardistes proposed the sublation of art — sublation in the Hegelian sense of the term: art was not to be simply destroyed, but transferred to the praxis of life, where it would be preserved, albeit in a changed form" (Bürger, 1974: 49). Art had become a niche reserved and mythified by the ruling bourgeoisie. Without the pathos later to be found in Adorno, art was already criticized for being out of touch with life. So it was that, in the short-lived alliance between Surrealists and Communists, there arose the hope — the pre-Stalinist hope, we would now say — that the social alternative formulated by Marxist theory might save art from suffocation. One is reminded of Benjamin's well-known thesis that the movies would be the right medium to break with the "aura" — "the single appearance of a distant thing [eine Ferne], however close it may be" (Benjamin, 1936: 1-2, 440) — that kept art out of the reach of the common people. This hope, it is hardly necessary to say, failed dismally. Movies indeed turned out to have the power to attract a huge audience. The market has understood this all too well, and invested in their appropriation. It would be just as useless to call attention to Marcel Duchamp's experiment: to present an object of [end page 101] everyday life, a urinal, as a sculpture. If such a metamorphosis was possible, what could it mean but that the bourgeois distinction conferred on art was merely a mystification? The suicide of art had begun to be effected by those who meant to save it. If a urinal can be taken as sculpture, why not say that all art is a mere fetish? Curiously, the sort of sublation of art exemplified by Duchamp brought to the fore again the old Platonic condemnation. The liberal market, however, is not interested in this sort of intellectual hairsplitting. All that is needed is a sharp eye for new profits. From the market's viewpoint, it mattered little whether or not Duchamp's gesture amounted to a modern version of the ancient condemnation of art — it was scandal itself that was interesting. The point was to absorb scandal and make a new commodity of it. Indeed, the equal renown achieved by Duchamp and the execrable Salvador Dalí stands as a sign of the victory of the market. For the agents of the market, the autonomy of art, even its self-questioning practice, is simply a way to diversify its business. It is not only time that is money: from now on, avant-garde products are money too. However incontrovertible the liberation brought about by the autonomy of art might have been, its consequence was to break the fragile defense that always accompanied the legitimating of art. If in the 20th century practitioners and theorists of art realized that autonomy — questioning the role of representation (Clive Bell), demystifying the aura of art (Marcel Duchamp), and, finally, finding that the structure of society itself is its major enemy (T.W. Adorno) — had the effect of distancing art from life, then we have the right to say that autonomy ultimately has had a boomerang effect: autonomous art either loses its specificity, being converted in a commodity, or is rendered useless. (Between these two poles few artists may be found who, not yet legitimized by either consumers or experts, support themselves working in universities, museums, libraries and research centers.) There is no valid alternative: art is like a shipwreck survivor that grabs any floating object to keep from sinking for a while longer. Reflection unavoidably led to a rude pathos (no other conclusion were possible if one took Adorno's last work as a guide). Could an alternative be found if, instead of looking back on the early '20s, we turn to more recent views? For reasons of space, let me consider just one notable representative of so-called deconstruction: Paul de Man. Although his name and his books are no longer as popular as they were a few years ago, particularly among U.S. academic circles, the direction he followed still retains considerable prestige. I will invoke one of de Man's seminal texts, The Resistance to Theory, first presented orally in the spring of 1981[2]. [end page 102] For de Man, the resistance to theory is felt particularly in the study of literature, since "if the condition of existence of an entity is itself critical, then the theory of this entity is bound to fall back into the pragmatics.… The attempt to treat literature theoretically may as well resign itself to the fact that it has to start out from empirical considerations" (de Man, 1986: 5). Resistance would be a consequence of the literary object itself to the extent that it disconnects language from its communicative-referential function, which seems to give it stability. The other side of resistance to theory would be the proliferation of currents in literary criticism, oriented by "cultural and ideological" principles, which aim at "the integrity of a social and historical self rather than… the impersonal consistency that theory requires" (ibid., 6). For this reason, such currents make a point of not "breaking the surface of an ambiguous decorum" (ibid.). The previous consideration is a sort of preamble to his capital statement: Literary theory can be said to come into being when the approach to literary texts is no longer based on non-linguistic, that is to say historical and aesthetic, considerations or, to put it somewhat less crudely, when the object of discussion is no longer the meaning of the value but the modalities of production and of reception of meaning and of value prior to their establishment — the implication being that this establishment is problematic enough to require an autonomous discipline of critical investigation to consider its possibility and its status. (ibid., 7; my emphasis) One notices the association between the maintenance of an "ambiguous decorum" and the negative emphasis on historical and aesthetic considerations. The orientations stemming from them, however divergent they may be, have the same status: they are external approaches to literary language. Although de Man himself does not use the word 'autonomy,' it is quite proper to include it in the gloss of his argument: theory of literature (by extension, of art) is an urgent task, since it concerns a special use of language. Aesthetics was founded by Baumgarten and came to play a major role in modern thought when Kant characterized its experience as finality without an end. To de Man this moment was a decisive one, but in a negative sense: it grounded an empiricism that hinders a real understanding of the object it supposedly interprets. De Man adds: The advent of theory… occurs with the introduction of linguistic terminology in the metalanguage about literature. By linguistic terminology is meant a terminology that designates reference prior [end page 103] to designating the referent and takes into account, in the consideration of the world, the referential function of language or, to be somewhat more specific, that considers reference as a function of language and not necessarily as an intuition. (ibid., 8, my emphasis) Clearly, de Man's idea was not to turn literary theory into a secondary branch of linguistics — the way Baumgarten had made aesthetics subordinate to logic — but rather to stress the separation between referent, as an intuited view of a world scene, and reference, exclusively a function of language. Moreover, if the referent is not an intuitively constituted object, two implications follow: (a) the referent is not something that depends on the activity of the self; (b) the referent is not something that, taken by the subject as the support of literary texts, links what the text presents with a state of things, i.e., with a world view. This explains de Man's disdain for so-called aesthetic experience. The resistance to theory, in short, ultimately derives from Cratylus, who defended a nonconventionalist conception of words. One remembers his formulation according to Socrates: "names belong to things by nature and… not every one is an artisan of names, but only he who keeps in view the name which belongs by nature to each particular thing and is able to embody its form in the letters and syllables" (Plato, 390d-e). Consequently, the belief that fiction implies a relationship with the world, even if the world in question is not a factual or historical one, is still a form of Cratylean arbitrariness: Literature is fiction not because it somehow refuses to acknowledge 'reality,' but because it is not a priori certain that language functions according to principles which are those, or which are like those, of the phenomenal world. It is therefore not a priori certain that literature is a reliable source of information about anything but its own language. (de Man, 1986: 11) The denial of the linkage between literature (and, by extension, art) and the world implies an emphasis on the role of rhetoric: "The resistance to theory is a resistance to the rhetorical or tropological dimension of language…" (ibid., 17). The task of theory and of theoretically informed criticism would be to deconstruct the illusion that literary language could possibly concern anything besides its own tropes. Literature is pure language, a combination of chosen tropes, self-contained, unconnected to the empirical world, to which it alludes only apparently. Wlad Godzich tries to associate Man's conception with Heidegger's ontological dimension (1986, xvii), I don't find any support for this in de Man's texts. [end page 104] We have singled out Paul de Man's conception because it represents the culminating point of deconstruction, the last major theoretical current of the previous century. According to the Belgian-American scholar, the autonomy of art precipitated a different crisis: it shook the philosophical and epistemological convictions of Western thought. If art is reduced to its tropological dimension, then it speaks only about itself. The real theoretical dimension would constitute a sort of asceticism or, if one accepts Godzich's hypothesis, a kind of profane mysticism. This is a consequence as radical as Adorno's, albeit in a quite different direction. Adorno's perspective is that our capitalist society has to change in order to avoid the serial production of "one-dimensional men." Art by itself cannot do this; its contribution amounts to no more than an indirect indictment. On the contrary, de Man's project places society between brackets. To be an expert in literature (or any other art) is to acknowledge that our task has nothing to do with what Husserl called the "life-world" (Lebenswelt). Against desperation, the alternative is to embrace a kind of professional asceticism. It would be impossible to explain here why I believe de Man's alternative is a dangerous blind alley. I will do no more than observe that the fact that literature is not reduced to the referential function of language does not imply the disappearance of the referent. De Man assumes that fiction carries out a particular epoché (a suspension of acceptance of the world): everything that belongs to our "stock of knowledge" is bracketed. It is one thing, however, to suspend our everyday attitudes and beliefs provisionally, and quite another to delete them from the work of art. De Man assumes that Celan's "distance-of-the-self," by means of which the poet enlarges his own personal experiences, is replaced by an act of erasure. If so, then, in an involuntary parody of Husserl's criticism of the physicalist objectivism of modern science (cf. Husserl, 1954), fiction would long ago have arrived at a similar full-fledged objectivism. On the contrary, the hard question is how the fictional text can get in touch with the world, since it has no intrinsic pragmatic or philosophical purpose. In order to outline the basis of this position, we must proceed in an almost telegraphic way. The basic problem brought about by the autonomy of art has to do with the stand we take on the question of the self. And this relates at once to the issue of representation. If we conceive of representation as the textual correlate of something already in the world, either as perceptual recognition or as acceptance of institutional beliefs, then Clive Bell is quite correct to say that the representative element is irrelevant to artistic form. The route opened by Cézanne broke with a deceptive complicity generally assumed by his forerunners. If, however, we accept Wolfgang Iser's position, already announced in his first major essay, "Die Appelstruktur der Texte" ("The Appeal-Structure of the Text") (1970), that the literary [end page 105] work has a peculiar structure because it is permeated with empty places (Leerstellen) — quite unlike a mathematical theorem, the demonstrative chain of which is perfect to the extent that it does not allow active intervention of the reader — empty places formed by discontinuous statements or not causally motivated, then this kind of text must necessarily take into account the responses evinced from the reader (cf. Iser, 1976). From this we deduce: representation, particularly in this kind of structure, is not to be confused with the textual correlate of perceived scenes or previously accepted fantastic beings — angels or demons, monsters or strange creatures — since it also contains the way the receiver gives significance to and thus supplements the empty places that are part of the literary (or artistic) work. Now, this active role assigned to representation is exacerbated by the character of autonomous art. Since it breaks with the patterns of classical tradition, it digs up its "psychical germ" without being tamed by the previously known and expected tropes. Therefore it is bound to shock its receivers, including experts, who are afraid of their own responses or of the consequences on their lives. As David Freedberg has aptly remarked: "Much of our sophisticated talk about art is simply an evasion. We take refuge in such talk when, say, we discourse about formal qualities, or when we rigorously historicize the work, because we are afraid to come to terms with our responses" (Freedberg, 1989: 429-30). If we accept this relevance of the self as a necessary supplement of a structure-with-empty-places, the long-acknowledged equivalence between mimesis and imitatio can no longer be accepted. While imitatio assumes the correspondence between the artwork and a norm stressed as a pattern, i.e., a well-reinforced norm, mimesis assumes an intuitive, not a conceptual, recognition that implies that the work transforms the expected similitude into an unforeseen difference. Considered in this way, mimesis is allotropy in action. To employ Husserl's phrase, the "life-world" (Lebenswelt) is the starting point of mimesis. During the making of the work, the operating self is transfigured in the distance-of-the-self. The same process occurs at the supplementing reception — it would not be supplementing if it simply confirmed what was previously known. What is invested with a meaning is still the world that had provided the occasion for the "germ" of the difference, with which the work is configured. That is to say: it is necessary that one should recognize something of the world in this final difference. Without this minimal acknowledgement, the difference makes no sense. That is why the distance-of-the-self is not to be confused with a state of impersonality, but with the condition of exploring, with the imagination, possibilities opened to one in the face of the world that previously were [end page 106] repressed or could not have been foreseen. The fact that the life-world achieves unpredictable forms does not place the supplement outside the world. What is achieved is an unpredictable sense of the world. In order to conceive of such argumentation, however, it is necessary to remake the modern conception of the self and to do away with the usual antagonistic notions: the self as the controlling consciousness of its representations, the self as a self-consistent unity commanding its own actions and representations, as well as the opposite one that sees the self — i.e., the psychologically oriented subject — as a simple, accidental and secondary phenomenon, a voice echoing in the ontic, while the important side of the world belongs to the hidden ontological sphere. Accidental and secondary, the self becomes not only irrelevant but — why not? — an irresponsible creature. The actions it accomplishes are worthless. To call this profane mysticism, as I myself have done above, is to underestimate this refusal of responsibility for one's acts.[3] I agree that the autonomy of art has a paradoxical character: the counterpart of the liberation it brought about was the bondage of art to the market. No theory of art could redeem it. To say that the question of autonomy demands rethinking the question of the self does not imply that the fulfillment of this task will suffice to solve the question of art, let alone to settle the question as to how our lives ought to be lived. Such rethinking would be subordinate to a larger task: the questioning of the central position of the market. About this, since we share in the general astonishment, we have nothing to say. But who ever said that the world is such a symmetrical totality that the solution to its problems would necessarily be a totalizing one? Trans. from Portuguese revised by Paulo Henriques Britto [1]. About the relationship between the early Romantics and abstractionism, see Klaus Lankheit, "Die Frühromantik und die Gradlagen der 'gegenstandslosen' Malerei," in Neue Heidelberger Jahrbucher, 1951: 55-90; and Charles Rosen, "The Intense Inane: Religious revival in English, French, and German Romanticism", republished in his Romantic Poets, Critics, and Other Madmen. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998: 31-50. [2]. For further information, both on this particular text and on de Man's work in general, see "The Tiger on the Paper Mat," Wlad Godzich's excellent introduction to The Resistance to Theory, Minneapolis: U of [end page 107] Minnesota P, 1986. On de Man's influence, cf. Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich & Wallace Martin, eds., The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. [3]. I must stop here in order not to re-utter the thesis set forth in my Mímesis: desafio ao pensamento (Mimesis: Challenge to thinking; reviewed by Élide Valarini Oliver in Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 17.34 [Fall-Winter/automne-hiver, 2000]: 441-4). References Adorno, Theodor W., Ästhetische Theorie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970. Barck, Karlheinz, Martin Fontius et al, eds., Ästhetische Grundbegriffe, vol. 1. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2000. Bell, Clive, Art. London: Chatto and Windus, 1931 (1914). Benjamin, Walter, "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit." (1936). In R. Tiedemann and H. Schweppenhäuser, eds., Gesammelte Schriften. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980. Bohrer, Karl H., Plötzlichkeit. Zum Augenblick des ästhetischen Scheins. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981. Bürger, Peter, Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. M. Shaw. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. Celan, Paul, "Der Meridian." In Der Meridian und andere Prosa. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988. Freedberg, David, The Power of Images. Studies in the history and theory of response. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989. Iser, Wolfgang, Der Akt des Lesens. Theorie ästhetischer Wirkung. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt, 1976. (The Act of Reading. A theory of aesthetic response. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1978.) Godzich, Wlad, "The Tiger on the Paper Mat." Foreword to Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. _____, "Foreword" to Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. Husserl, Edmund, Die Krisis der europaischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie. Ed. Walter Biemel. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962. (The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. An introduction to phenomenological philosophy. Trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1970.) [end page 108] Marx, Karl, "Der Fetischcharakter der Ware und sein Geheimnis." In Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, Book I, vol. 1, #4. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke, vol. 23. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1977. Plato, Cratylus. Trans. Harold North Fowler. The Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/ Schlegel, Friedrich, "Fragmente zur Poesie und Literatur II," c. 1800. In H. Eichner, ed., Kritische Ausgabe seiner Werke, vol. XVI. Paderborn: Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh & Thomas-Verlag, 1981. Simmel, Georg, Rembrandt. Ein kunstphilosophischer Versuch. Munich: Matthes & Seitz, 1985 (1916, changed edition: 1919). Tieck, Ludwig, Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen. Ed. A. Anger. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1966 (1798).
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